Since the advent of TV and home video, more people living in the media-saturated
culture to which I belong hear more music in conjunction with moving pictures
than in any other way. The fact that computer games, with their more or less
constant music, generate greater global sales than those of the music industry
reinforces this tendency. Yet music analysis, as it is still generally taught,
pays little heed to such facts. Indeed, it is no longer just works from the
Euro-classical canon that music academics dissect as if their sonic structures
had no meaning beyond their syntactic relation to each other: even pop songs
are now given the Schenkerian crossword-puzzle treatment. If music analysis
is to be of any use to the majority of people living in the same culture as
I do, it must clearly deal with music as if it meant something beyond itself.
This article argues that the notion of a museme can, despite its problems, help
scholars tackle this semiotic task.

Musemes and structures

It was Charles Seeger (1960:76) who invented the term museme.

[It is a] ‘unit of three components — three tone beats — [which] can constitute
two progressions and meet the requirements for a complete, independent unit
of music-logical form or mood in both direction and extension…. It can be regarded
as… a musical morpheme or museme.’

There are two main problems with Seeger’s notion: [1] its comparison with the
morpheme of (verbal) language derives from linguistic theory of its time; [2]
it is syntactically defined without reference to semantics or pragmatics. These
problems are interrelated.

Seeger (1960) was not the only musicologist of his time to draw linguistic
parallels. Nettl (1958) and Bright (1963) also referred to linguistic models
which still accorded semiotic primacy to the written word, to denotation and
to the arbitrary or conventional sign. These parallels were criticised by such
musicologists as Nattiez (1975, 1987), Imberty (1976, 1979), Lerdahl & Jackendoff
(1977) and Keiler (1978) who drew attention to differences between musical and
linguistic semiosis. More recently, denotative primacy has been challenged by
linguists arguing that prosody and the social rules of speech (timbre, diction,
intonation, volume, facial expression, gesture, etc.) are as intrinsic to language
as verbal denotation (Atkinson, 1984; Bolinger, 1989; Cruise, 1988; Eco, 1990;
Kress, 1993, etc.). In simple terms, the statements DON’T WORRY ABOUT ME said
nonchalantly and DON’T WORRY ABOUT ME spoken with bitter resentment mean no
more the same thing than do the first line of your national anthem played by
a symphony orchestra and the same passage sung out of tune by someone with a
foreign accent accompanied by two drunks on kazoo and accordion playing bebop
chords in time with techno drum loops. Since the three first tone beats (however
those are defined) of your national anthem can carry such different meanings
when performed so differently, it is impossible to accept that a museme, at
least as defined by Seeger, constitutes the musical equivalent of a morpheme.

The main problem with Seeger’s definition is that it relies on tonal syntax
in the same way as a morpheme is conventionally understood to consist of temporally
(‘horizontally’) contiguous phonemes without consideration of its paradigmatic
(‘vertical’) elements — intonation, volume, timbre, etc. If a morpheme, within
the context of any one language, is a minimal unit of speech that is recurrent
and meaningful, then a museme should, within the context of any single musical
culture, own similar properties. The difficulty here is, as the two renditions
of your national anthem illustrate, that the sound of a symphony orchestra,
or of a kazoo, or of a drunk singing out of tune, or of techno drum loops etc.,
is each, in semiotic practice, inseparable from the tonal material of which
it is part when heard in performance as opposed to merely read in notation.
Of course, with any form of polyphony the notion of minimal units of musical
meaning becomes even more complex.

This article does not aim to solve the mystery of what constitutes a minimal
unit of musical meaning, but it is clear that such minimal units of musical
meaning, if they exist, must be considered as paradigmatic as well as syntagmatic
phenomena (Nattiez, 1975). If musemes do exist as minimal units of musical ‘code’,
then each one must be a culturally specific musical structure, named or unnamed,
that different members of the same music-making community can consistently identify
and produce; it must also be recognisable as having a consistently similar function
when heard by different members of the same general music culture to which the
musicians producing that structure also belong. It would, however, be premature
at this stage of research —and an act of intellectual alchemy— to try and distill
the theoretical essence of ‘The Museme’ without first providing concrete examples
of how the construction (poïesis) and reception (esthesis) of different individual
musical structures are demonstrably linked within the same general music culture.
Such concretion, which by its very nature involves detailed consideration of
musical semantics and pragmatics, meets two serious stumbling blocks in conventional
Western musicology: [1] syntax fixation does not favour semantic models based
on paradigmatic reasoning; [2] notions of what constitutes a ‘musical structure’
are one-sided and/or unproblematised.

The historical causes of the syntax fixation which still dogs music studies
in the West are too complex to explain in this article (see Tagg & Clarida,
2003: 9-32). Suffice it here to say that syntax fixation is so entrenched in
institutionalised music scholarship that many scholars parading under the banner
of semiotics seem to abandon semantics and pragmatics as irrelevant to their
subject (ibid.: 47-57). It is no easy matter to convince those whose research
career involves a semiotics by name but not by nature that theirs is, as Eco
(1990: 256, ff., 266) put it, a ‘perverse discipline’. Unfortunately, syntax
fixation also perverts concepts of musical ‘structure’, including notions of
what constitutes a minimal unit of musical meaning.

In conventional musicology it is much more common to designate musical, especially
tonal, structures in constructional (poïetic) terms —‘pentatonicism’, ‘C major’,
‘?VII’, etc.—, rather than from a receptional (esthesic/phenomenological) viewpoint
—‘detective chord’, ‘grace note’, ‘bitch voice’, etc. Whereas discourse about
the visual arts allows the commentator to refer to objects in a painting in
terms of what they (appear to) signify rather than of how they are constructed,
descriptors of musical structures often come across as technical gobbledygook
to listeners whose receptional competence is unquestionable (e.g. Francès, 1958;
Stefani, 1982; Tagg & Clarida, 2003). If semiotics, according to Morris (1938),
is a matter of semantics and pragmatics, as well as of syntax (Eco, 1990: 256,
ff.), then scholars interested in musical signification face a serious problem
because the signifiers they study are rarely designated in relation to their
signifieds in the culture of which both are a part (Tagg, 2001: 2-7).

To summarise: music’s signifiers (musemes) cannot logically exist unless related
to their signifieds and those signifieds cannot be examined without some kind
of empirical underpinning, not just in terms of musical syntax but also, and
more urgently, in terms of paramusical phenomena demonstrably and consistently
linked, in a given cultural context, to the musical structures under discussion.
In short, musical semantics and pragmatics need to be prioritised and conventional
musicology’s obsession with syntax needs to take a back seat in order to redress
the semiotic balance.

‘Anguish’

As a minute contribution to a less syntax-fixated music semiotics, this article
considers one broad semantic field. An obvious question here is which semantic
field to select, but that question begs another: how to select any semantic
field if no definition of musical signifiers can exist without considering their
signifieds and if studies of musical reception providing empirical evidence
of those potential signifieds are so rare. The short answer is that no aspect
of musical semiosis can be identified without testing hypotheses based on observations
of at least two types of consistency: [1] interobjective or intertextual, i.e.
the same or similar musical structure (designated at this stage of research
in constructional or poïetic terms) used in different works by different musicians
belonging to the same basic music culture; [2] the same or similar paramusical
phenomena linked by different individuals, belonging to the same basic music
culture, to the same or similar musical structures (receptional or esthesic
designation).

What follows is therefore based on intertextual and intersubjective procedures
set out in Ten Little Title Tunes (Tagg & Clarida 2003: 94-152), a study which
addresses structural, theoretical and ideological issues of musical semiosis
. ‘Ideological’ refers here not only to overtly political categories (e.g. gender,
normality, ethnicity, military) but also to other general semantic fields which,
when examined historically in terms of patterns of subjectivity, appear no less
ideological (e.g. heroism, urgency, speed, fashion, family, violence, love).
This text presents a brief discussion of one such covertly ideological semantic
field which, for want of a better label, we shall call anguish. In fact, respondents
(mainly Swedish, some Latin-American) providing the empirical data identifying
this type of musicogenic semantic field never mentioned anguish. Their connotations
were expressed in such terms as difficulties, problems, trouble; against the
will of…, despite…, external obstacles; destiny, fate; pain, suffering; sad,
tragic; lonely, abandoned; melancholy, longing, languishing; parting, separating
etc. Such connotations occurred in response (and in varying degrees) to only
four of the ten title tunes played to respondents.

Although slow tempo and, in three of the four tunes, minor key were among the
structural common denominators of the music eliciting the sort of response just
enumerated, they were not the main tonal determinants of the ‘anguish’ connotations
just listed. Three other tonal elements were more operative in distinguishing
‘anguish’ from other other semantic fields —funeral, dirge, depression, for
example— which, in mainstream Western culture, also rely on slow tempo and minor
mode. The three tonal elements recurring in the four tunes heard by respondents
as connoting ‘anguish’, but absent in the six other tunes giving rise to no
such connotations, were: (1) the ‘minor add 9’ sonority (abbreviated madd9);
(2) the half-diminished chord, i.e. ‘minor seven flat five’ (m7?5) and its inversion
as ‘minor six’ (m6, i.e. a minor triad with added major sixth); (3) a ‘tortuous
tune’, i.e. a melody characterised by disjunct profile and/or emphasised melodic
dissonance.

Fully aware of other parameters of expression operative in producing sonic
‘anguish’ —taut or grating timbre, strained vocal or instrumental register,
irregular patterns of accentuation, for example— we will nevertheless concentrate
on the tonal traits just mentioned for three practical reasons: [1] this article
would swell to unwieldy proportions if all relevant parameters were to be treated
in equal detail; [2] Western music notation allows for at least some graphic
representation of many important tonal parameters on the printed page, while
no satisfactory or generally accepted equivalent exists for, say, variations
of timbre or accentuation: an accompanying CD would then be necessary to make
sense of this text; [3] while various conventions of structural denotation already
exist for music’s tonal aspects, they have yet to be established for description
of timbre and accentuation: treating these latter aspects would require extensive
sections of text devoted to the establishment of a viable terminology.

Minor add nine

There is no room here to give more than a few examples of the madd9 chord’s
long history in the West. [1] As a minor triad with suspended major ninth (msus9
is paradigmatically the same as madd9), it dominates the final section of the
Agnus Dei from Byrd’s Mass in 4 Parts (ex. ). [2] It is a common device for
madrigalistic woe, underscoring words like ‘wherewith I mourn and melt’ (Byrd’s
Wounded I Am) and ‘Ay me! I sit and cry’ (Morley’s Fire! Fire!). [3] It occurs
in poignant Dowland songs like Unquiet Thoughts and I Saw My Lady Weep. [4]
It often turns up in J S Bach’s harmonisations of such penitent or agony-related
chorales as Christ lag in Todesbanden or Ach, wie nichtig! Ach, wie flüchtig!
[5] Schubert uses it (as madd9, not msus9) in the accompaniment to Gretchen’s
bitter complaining (ex. ).

The madd9 chord is no stranger to film scores. It plays a prominent part in
three of the four tunes connoting ‘anguish’ to several hundred respondents,
for example Rota’s theme for Zeffirelli’s Romeo and Juliet (ex. ; see also ex.
). It is also a favourite of Morricone’s in situations where poignant sadness,
tragedy, separation or bitter fate are on the narrative menu, as in the ‘Ophelia’
cues from Hamlet (1990), in the theme underscoring the death of young Cockeye
in Once upon a Time in America (1984), in the cues ‘Abduction’ and ‘Death of
Oahn’ for Casualties of War (1989), or in the title theme from Lolita (1997),or
in ‘Nostalgia of the Father’ from Marco Polo (1982, ex. ), to name but a few.

Ex. 4. Morricone: ‘Nostalgia of the Father’ from Marco Polo (1982)

The same sonority also turns up in connection with lyrics of fateful sadness
in postwar popular song. For example, the Bovary-like ‘Madame’ of Alain Bashung’s
Madame rêve (1991) dreams longingly and hopelessly of un silence si long and
of un amour qui la flingue to the accompaniment of the same minor-key semitone
dynamic between major second and minor third. In Western Eyes (1997), Portishead’s
Beth Gibbons whines ‘I’m breaking at the seams just like you’ with the minor-add-nine’s
semitone between degrees 2 and ?3 (9??10) pulsating in the background. The same
madd9 semitone device is treated more melodically than harmonically both in
Radiohead’s Life in a Glasshouse (2001) — ‘again I’m in trouble with an old
friend’ — and in Elvis Costello’s For Other Eyes (1993) — ‘I don’t know what
I should do’; ‘It’s over and done’. Among the most striking pop-rock examples
of the madd9 semitone crunch’s semantic field are Aerosmith’s Janie’s Got A
Gun (1989, ex. ) at ‘Run, run away-ay-ay’ (from the pain of sexual abuse) and
the piano track heard for at least 25% of Lionel Richie’s Hello (1985) whose
vocal persona sadly regrets never ‘getting the girl’ (ex. 5).

As stated above, madd9 featured prominently in three of the four title tunes
respondents connected with ‘anguish’, including Rota’s Romeo and Juliet theme
(ex. ). Even though the other two, the title music for A Streetcar named Desire
(1951, ex. a, a) and Deep Purple’s Owed to ‘g’ (1975, ex. b, b), produced a
response profile of crime and its detection in rough urban settings which differed
markedly from Romeo and Juliet’s with all its tragic love set in a rural past,
all three tunes shared both madd9 and a significant response rate for adversity,
difficulty, problems, trouble; away from, departure; lonely, abandoned.

Half-diminished

The two urban tunes just mentioned featured both madd9 and the second of the
three tonal traits linked with ‘anguish’ responses —the half-diminished chord
or its inversion as ‘minor add six’ (m6, ex. ).

We are in other words treating m6 and m7?5 paradigmatically as mutually invertible
variants of the same half-diminished sonority (ex. ).

Ex. 7. Mutual invertibility of Dm6 and Bm7?5

Ex. 8. Wagner’s Tristan chord as m7?5 or m6

Now, it may seem sacrilegious to consider the famous Tristan chord, about whose
syntactical complexity so many eminent scholars have written so much, as a mere
m7?5 or m6, but syntactical ambiguity is, as we shall see, only one of its semiotic
aspects.

Like madd9, the half-diminished sonority has a long history in music cultures
of the West. For example, John ‘sempre dolens’ Dowland uses it in such anguished
circumstances as the Lachrymae Pavane (Flow, My Tears) and at ‘consumed with
deepest sins’ in From Silent Night (1612), as does Campian to underscore the
breaking of vows in Oft Have I Sighed (1617). The chord also features prominently,
as both a Cm6 and an Em7?5, in the famous suicide aria from Purcell’s Dido &
Aeneas (ex. ). The verbal accompaniment to these and other English instances
of m7?5/m6 is quite tragic: living or dying forlorn, broken friendship, disclosing
shame, etc.

Ex. 9. Purcell: aria ‘When I am laid in earth’ (Dido & Aeneas, 1690)

There is of course nothing anguished in the Baroque tradition about a half-diminished
chord in the middle of an run of sevenths anticlockwise round a virtual circle-of-fifths:
as m7?5 or ii7, it just links VI7 to V7 in a progressionlike (i -) iv7 - VII7
- III7 - VI7 - ii7 - V7 (- i). However, ii7 or iv in the minor (and vii7 or
ii in the major key) have considerable semantic value in at least three other
syntactic contexts: [1] as second chord after an initial tonic; [2] in precadential
positions; [3] as pivot.

Restricting the Baroque part of this story to the works of J.S. Bach, the half-diminished
‘second chord’ turns up repeatedly in the first Kyrie of the B minor mass (‘Lord,
have mercy’) as well as in the opening chorus to both the St. Matthew and the
St. John passions. It also occurs in the same position or precadentially in
at least 36 settings of chorales with the following sorts of text: Herrn, ich
habe mißgehandelt; Wo soll ich fliegen hin?; Ach! Was soll ich Sünder machen;
Ach wie nichtig, ach wie flüchtig!; O Traurigkeit; Jesu Leiden, Pein und Tod;
Durch Adams Fall ist ganz verderbt; Christ lag in Todesbanden; Herr, straf mich
nicht in deinem Zorn; O Haupt voll Blut und Wunden; Meines Lebens letzte Zeit.
Add to this barrage of second-chord and precadential woe the vii7-s or iv-s
accompanying ‘his disciples forsook him and fled’, ‘the price of blood’ and
Peter’s denial ‘I do not know the man’ (all from the Matthew Passion) and we
are back to an anguished semantic field unambiguous enough to survive in instrumental
works of the rococo and classical periods. Indeed, if we accept Rosen’s description
of sonata form as ‘a dramatic performance’ (1976: 155), it will come as no surprise
that Mozart’s 40th symphony (K550), with Cm6 as its prominent second chord,
was characterised by early 19th-century commentators as ‘impassioned grief’,
ranging from ‘the saddest’ to the ‘most exalted’ (Stockfelt, 1988: 21-22).

Turning to the pivot aspect of our diminished-fifth tetrad, it is worth noting
that C.P.E. Bach (1974: 38) considered ‘no chord… more convenient’… than the
diminished seventh, ‘as a means of reaching the most distant keys more quickly
and with agreeable suddenness’. We would hold that the half-diminished chord
is pretty useful too, especially for modulating to related keys, as the Fm6/Dm7?5
(ii/vii7 in E? major, iv/ii7 in C minor) in bar 2 of example demonstrates.

Mozart often uses the half-diminished chord as pivot, for example in a impassioned
chromatic progression in the development section (bars 26-29) of the slow movement
in his E? Sinfonia concertante (K364). Schubert puts second-chord half-diminished
semiosis to good use in his nerve-racking Erlkönig chase music, in the tragically
listless Einsamkeit and, most markedly, to accompany the travelling stranger
on snowy roads in an inhospitable world where mad dogs howl outside their masters’
homes (ex. ).

Wagner’s famous Tristan chord is both potential pivot and prominent second-chord
if the anacrustic cello arpeggio is heard as an initial D minor tonic (see ex.
). While it is possible, using a couple of intermediate chords, to complete
a perfect cadence in any key from Tristan’s initial Fm7?5, its immediate continuation
into another two accentuated half-diminished ‘second-chords’ (the last one repeated
to boot) with no intervening modulation is evidence that the sonority had, at
least for Wagner in 1859, a semantic charge of its own. Indeed, it was a dramatic
device that he used again, for example when presenting Alberich’s curse of the
ring to the tune of a rising F?m7?5 arpeggio (ex. ).

The same sort of non-modulatory, quasi-autonomous harmonic device is used at
break-neck tempo by Grieg to start the ‘Abduction of the Bride’ section of the
Per Gynt suite (ex. ). The anguished Dm7?5s of that Grieg extract may well have
played a part in establishing half-diminished pathos as an element of musical
code in the modern mass media because those four bars constitute the only ‘Horror’
entry in one of the silent film era’s most widely used anthologies (Rapée, 1924:
173).

Half-diminished chords are two a penny in European romanticism where they seem
to work less technically as links to other keys, more like signs that a modulation
could occur, with all the uncertainty of direction that such ambiguity might
entail in terms of heightened drama and rhetoric. In the final reprise of Liszt’s
Liebenstraum (1847), for example, every other chord is half-diminished in a
chain of chromatic slides. It is worth noting that the harmonic language and
orchestration of Liszt’s tone poems resurface in many of Max Steiner’s film
scores, not least in Gone With the Wind (1939), the half-diminished chord appearing
in the languishing first bridge section of the film’s overture (ex. ), as well
as in the cue ‘Scarlett walks among the dead’.

Ex. 14. Steiner: Modulatory bridge in overture to Gone with the Wind (1939)

Tchaikovsky and Rachmaninov show a particular penchant for the precadential
half-diminished chord. The way they use the device in crisis-chord position,
i.e. at a point about 75% of the way through a particular period or section
(Tagg & Clarida, 2003: 211-4), is common and familiar (ex. ). It is also important,
for two reasons, in the development of widely understood notions of pathos in
mass-mediated music.

Firstly, the Tchaikovsky theme cited above has been used and abused too many
times as the sonic representation of ‘deep feelings’ on radio, TV and film to
mention here, while Rachmaninov’s second piano concerto in C minor fulfilled
so convincing a ‘passionate-but-hopeless-love’ function in Brief Encounter (1945)
that its connotations could be parodied a decade later in the Marilyn Monroe
box-office success The Seven Year Itch (1955). The popularity of ivory-bashing
popular classics like these gave rise to a series of piano-concertante clones
that were used in films, many of which were produced in the UK during World
War II, and which film critics Halliwell & Purser (1986) review in terms like
‘harrowing’, ‘gripping’, ‘tearjerker’, ‘romance suffused with tragedy’, etc.
Addinsell’s Warsaw Concerto (ex. ) was one such clone, composed for Dangerous
Moonlight (1941), an ‘immensely popular wartime romance’… in which ‘a Polish
pianist escapes from the Nazis and loses his memory after flying in the Battle
of Britain’ (op. cit.).

Example 17’s anacrustically catapulted Cm7?5 is far from the only m7?5/m6 in
the piece and the Warsaw Concerto is not the sole representative of a genre
in which half-diminished chords recur so often as to act as one of its style
indicators. That repertoire also includes, for instance, Rota’s music for The
Glass Mountain (1949), Rózsa’s Spellbound Concerto (1940) and Brodzsky’s score
for RAF, The Way to the Stars (1945). All these films fit the melodramatic pathos
bill alluded to earlier and all appear on the album Big Concerto Movie Love
Themes (1972).

Secondly, half-diminished tetrads occur precadentially as melodramatic crisis
chords in many a prewar popular tune, and in the usual sort of position, for
example at bar 26 (of 32) in Tierney’s Alice Blue Gown (1920), Rodgers’ Manhattan
(1925) and Rapée’s Charmaine (1925), or at bar 14 (of 17) in Breil’s ‘Love Strain’
(ex. ), etc. Crisis chords in this position do not need to be half-diminished
but they have to contain four or more different pitches, at least one of which
must be key-extrinsic (e.g. E7+, Fm6, F?dim, A?7 or F?m?5 in bar 14 of ex. ).
The whole point is to insert a touch of melodrama offsetting the subsequent
V–I cadence’s ‘happy ending’. The fact that half-diminished chords often fulfil
such a function confirms their status as signifiers of drama and pathos in highly
familiar types of popular music.

One category of half-diminished tetrads has yet to be discussed: the ‘jazz’
minor six (m6) chord, as quoted in example 6. Superficially the chord seems
to be little else than a colouristic alteration of a standard minor triad; after
all, major sixths can be added to minor triads other than the tonic, as, for
example, in Ellington’s Koko (1940) or in Billie Holliday’s recording of Gloomy
Sunday (1941), or in Gershwin’s ‘Summertime’ and ‘It Ain’t Necessarily So’ (Porgy
& Bess, 1935). If so, Debussy’s ‘autonomous’ Fm7?5s underscoring the heroine’s
tears in Pelléas et Mélisande (ex. ) ought also to be qualified as colouristic,
but that is hardly likely since the composer’s choice of harmony is clearly
related to the expression mark plaintif he has written in the score. Although
technically correct from a syntactical viewpoint, the notion of harmonic ‘autonomy’
just presented misses the semiotic point on at least two counts.

First, the sonority contains the same array of pitches as those half-diminished
chords which are, as argued earlier, often treated with relative syntactic autonomy
in film music and popular song. It is highly improbable that musicians exposed
to such widely disseminated music as Tchaikovsky’s first piano concerto, or
Rapée’s Charmaine, or Steiner’s score for Gone with the Wind would be oblivious
to the obvious connotative charge of its half-diminished chords.

Second, the jazz minor six chord was, in the hegemonic WASP (= White Anglo-Saxon
Protestant) mentality of inter-war years in the USA, often associated with music
performed by particular people (mostly African-American) in particular places
(e.g. smoky dives and speakeasies). It was also linked either with lyrics dealing
with death and crime (e.g. St. James Infirmary) or with other aspects of a ‘threatening’
subculture (e.g. Ellington’s ‘jungle’ style). Due to these connections, the
chord came to function as genre synecdoche (Tagg & Clarida, 2003: 99-103) for
a semantic field including such phenomena as seedy US urban locations, African-American
subculture, night, danger and crime. It is therefore no coincidence that Gershwin
used plenty of minor triads with added major sixths for Porgy & Bess scenes
located in an African-American slum, no wonder that Harlem Nocturne was the
title chosen by Earle Hagen for his C minor piece ‘for E? saxophone and concert
band’ (ex. ).

In short, the jazz minor-six chord embodies a dual semiosis in which the synecdochal
particularities of its inter-war usage in the USA combine with the general melodramatic
pathos value of the classical and popular classical half-diminished chord to
reinforce rather than contradict one another. However, the semiotic interaction
between classical and popular tonal idioms in dealing with anguish does not
stop with madd9 and m7?5/m6.

Ex. 18. Hagen: Harlem Nocturne (1940)

‘Tortuous tunes’

Harlem Nocturne (ex. ) contains all three of the ‘anguish’ traits discussed
in this text: [1] madd9, complete with semitone crunch between 2 and ?3; [2]
a half-diminished chord (as m6); [3] a melody characterised by disjunct profile
and/or emphasised melodic dissonance — a ‘tortuous tune’. All three traits also
feature prominently in two of the four tunes eliciting the ‘anguish’ connotations
that enabled us to posit the general semantic field in the first place. The
harmonic traits, cited in example , accompany the melodic lines shown in example
.

Ex. 19. Initial melodic phrases from (a) North: Title music for A Streetcar
named Desire (1951); (b) Deep Purple: Owed to ‘g’ (1975).

In addition to all the adversity, crime, danger and seedy locations envisaged
by respondents hearing these tunes, ‘detective’ was another common connotation,
i.e. the individual, usually a white male, supposed to bring some semblance
of order and justice into his inimical surroundings. The only trouble is, at
least in a stereotypical film noir plot, that the detective’s own life is such
a mess: apart from the consolatory whisky bottle in the desk drawer of his ramshackle
office, he is usually out of pocket, beaten up by hoodlums, thwarted by ‘jobsworth’
police officials, and often unhappily but passionately involved with the femme
fatale implicated in the web of deceit he has to unravel, only to end up alone
in stake-outs, alone tailing suspects, alone philosophising about the evils
of this world. The ‘anguish’ of such a P.I.’s theme tune is therefore just as
much ‘his’ as the listener’s, not least because the relationship between the
visual narrative’s foreground figure (the P.I.) and his environment can also
be identified in the melody-accompaniment dualism between melodic figure and
‘backing’ parts. Since we have discussed these and other aspects of detective
music semiosis at length elsewhere (e.g. Tagg, 1998) we will do no more here
than cite two of the most familiar English-language TV detective themes (ex.
) and add that Harlem Nocturne (ex. ) was revamped as theme for the CBS TV detective
series Mike Hammer (1983).

Of course, ‘tortuous tunes’ in the minor key, with their altered fifths, sharp
sevenths, ‘dissonant’ ninths, etc. are by no means exclusive to TV detectives.
Marconi (2001: 66-110) cites enough musical outbursts of anxiety, complaint,
desperation etc. to substantiate a long history of similar semiosis in the European
classical tradition, including examples from Mozart’s Don Giovanni, Verdi’s
Il trovatore and Aïda, and Bach’s Matthew Passion. In musical-rhetorical terms
of the Baroque period, we are dealing with phenomena that might well have been
given such labels as pathopeia, saltus duriusculus, etc. (Bartel, 1997: 357-62;
381-2), i.e. the sort of tortuous line to which Bach sets Peter’s remorseful
tears after denying Christ in both the Matthew and John Passion (‘und weinete
bitterlich’), or the anxious penitence of the Kyrie eleison fugues in the B
Minor Mass, including their half-diminished and Neapolitan chords, or the F?
minor aria Ach, Herr! Was ist ein Menschenkind? with its minor-sixth and diminished-seventh
leaps concurring with the Lord suffering such great pain to bring about the
redemption of the wayward ‘child of Man’.

Although it may seem sacrilegious to lump divine suffering for the redemption
of humanity together with the urban Angst of private detectives, it is clear
that their musical and paramusical commonalities are quite substantial.

Musemes and ideology

In this article we have presented evidence of consistent correspondence, within
the broad context of Western musical traditions over the last few centuries,
between certain tonal structures and certain paramusical phenomena. Since we
focused on the particularities of musical structures connected with the general
semantic field we labelled ‘anguish’, the discussion might be termed musematic
in the same sense that the deconstruction of (verbal) language into its meaningful
constituent parts could be qualified as phonematic. However, it is clear that
we are still a long way from defining ‘museme’ because, as is evident from differences
in timbre, orchestration, rhythmic articulation, accentuation, etc. between
most of the extracts cited, and because these differences are also meaningful
(for instance, madd9 yelled by a rock vocalist in ex. a compared to its discrete
articulation in the piano part of ex. ), different occurrences of the same tonal
structure in different works belonging to the same broad music culture do not
necessarily have the same meaning. Nevertheless, just as structural and paramusical
commonalities demonstrably exist between minor-key detective themes and grief-stricken
Bach arias, so they do between the Aerosmith and Schubert examples (a and ):
both prominently feature madd9 and both express some aspect of anguish. If,
for the sake of argument, we posit madd9 as a museme in both instances, we will
also have to consider the rock yelling and the particular articulation of the
Schubert piano semiquavers, regardless of their tonal specificities, in equally
musematic terms. The only problem is that musicology, though terminologically
well-equipped to deal with most aspects of tertial tonality, is poorly prepared
for the analysis of musical timbre and the subtleties of rhythmic-dynamic articulation.
The development of models able to fill these and other methodological lacunae
is unfortunately an issue well beyond the scope of this article.

Despite the problems just mentioned, it is possible, using the sort of approach
sketched above, to demonstrate some important aspects of musical semiosis in
our culture. Not only can such an approach contribute to the development of
musicological method: by highlighting musicogenic categories of meaning it can
also raise issues of ideology relating to the social patterning of subjectivity
under changing political and economic circumstances.

For example, we have argued elsewhere (Tagg, 1994) that the decline of foreground
melodic figure and the relative prominence of backing loops in some kinds of
techno music not only represented a radical departure from the basic compositional
strategy of Western music since Monteverdi —the melody-accompaniment dualism—;
we also argued that the abandonment of such a central element of musical structuration
in our culture (‘what Haydn and AC/DC have in common’) corresponded with a rejection
of ‘the big ego’ (of melodic presentation in opera, jazz and rock, for example)
which, in its turn, related to a rejection of the perverted self of capitalists
let loose under Reagan and Thatcher.

Similar questions need to be asked about recent changes in the musical representation
of ‘anguish’. If, for the increasing number of marginalised members of our society
(including our ex-students who, despite their education, are unable to find
satisfactory employment), there is little credibility left in bourgeois notions
of the individual (e.g. the ‘American Dream’, the ‘self-made man’, the opera
diva, the big rock star, the greedy capitalist), how can impassioned musical
statements of the deep anguish such marginalisation surely causes be made or
heard? Worse, where are this society’s ‘successful’ role models from whom we
‘lesser mortals’ can take a lead in recognising the injustices of the system
under which we all try to survive and in expressing appropriate remorse for
all the pain and suffering it causes? Worse still, how can individuals express
any kind of anguish if they fail to develop, through learning the social skills
of guilt and reparation, the object relations that enable humans to distinguish
between self and environment (Klein, 1975)? It is a learning process under constant
threat from all that advertising which regularly exploits a psychotic symbiosis
that is quite normal in two-year-olds but that is (or, at least, was until recently)
considered a symptom of social disorder in adults.

These questions need to be addressed from a musicological viewpoint too, because
it has been possible recently to discern a certain reluctance to give Hollywood
movies, whose story lines veritably seethe with anguish, an underscore bearing
any resemblance to the sort of impassioned grief that the on-screen characters
clearly have to live through. American Beauty (Newman, 1999), Monster’s Ball
(Asche & Spencer, 2001) and The Life of David Gale (Parker, 2003) are three
such films: although their visual-verbal narrative is full of pain, injustice,
dignity, bitterness, loneliness, etc. ‘against all odds’, their scores are generally
conceived in a restrained, ambient vein, tinged by the occasional insertion
of subdued accompanimental dissonances. Is this lack of complementarity a contrapuntal
distancing device to make the on-screen anguish and sense of injustice more
poignant; or is it just an emotional self-censorship mechanism echoing tendencies
to repress reactions of anger and indignation against the societal causes of
grief and pain? Is this a new sort of musical ‘anguish management’ strategy?

Whether the tendency just mentioned can be verified or not, it would have been
impossible to ask any of these questions about the musical expression of anguish
in the current cultural climate without examining the phenomenon in terms of
musical signifiers and signifieds. That examination is facilitated by the existence
of the term ‘museme’ because, even though it may have no satisfactory definition,
it at least focuses attention on musical-structural detail and on the relation
of such detail to life ‘outside’ music. By paying attention to such detail it
is possible for musicology to start mapping musically determined categories
of thought which, in their turn, may contibute to a much broader understanding
of how patterns of subjectivity are formed in this media-saturated society.

Understanding the expression (or non-expression) of anguish as a musical category
may be an important step in developing strategies to deal with the alienation
and disempowerment felt by so many members of our society. This article has
only scratched the surface of that issue. One thing is sure: if, as musicologists,
we fail to meet the challenge such uncompleted work implies, we may well find
ourselves having to express serious amounts of remorse to those who are most
likely to be affected by our neglect.

NETTL, BRUNO (1958). Some linguistic approaches to music analysis. Journal
of the International Folk Music, 10.

ROSEN, CHARLES (1976). The Classical Style. Haydn London: Faber.

SEEGER, CHARLES (1960). ‘On the moods of a musical logic’. Journal of the American
Musicological Society, XXII. Reprinted in Studies in Musicology 1935-1975; Berkeley:
University of California Press (1977: 64-88).